Say Hello to Soccer, Football Fans

Say Hello to Soccer, Football Fans

The Premier League is coming to NBC later this month, and so the network is trying to interest more Americans in English football—without alienating all the fans the sport already has here.

The solution? Get Will Ferrell, er, Jason Sudeikis to play “Ted Lasso,” an American football coach hired to manage Tottenham Hotspur. This way you can introduce several of the league’s teams and rules while simultaneously making fun of both the people who don’t already know them and the seeming silliness, to many American sports fans, of some of those rules. (“Ties and no playoffs? Why do you even do this?”)

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Pretty clever, NBC. Will it work? We’ll find out Aug. 17.

David Haglund is a senior editor at Slate. He runs Brow Beat, Slate's culture blog.